The chronicles of a Bostonian tech geek navigating through life, technology, and general geekiness.

Menu

Tag Archives: privileged access

Access Reviews

Welcome to my final post on Azure Active Directory Privileged Identity Management (AAD PIM). Over this series of posts I’ve provided an overview of the service, guidance on how to set the service up, and a deep dive and look at the user and approver experience. We’ll wrap up the series by looking at the Access Review feature, take an intermission to look at a new feature, and wrap up with reviewing the Azure RBAC integration.

We have a lot to cover, so let’s jump into it.

As a quick refresher, I’ll be using my Journey Of the Geek tenant. Within the tenant I have some Office 365 E5 and EMS E5 licenses provisioned. Our admin user will be initiating the access review and Homer Simpson will acting as a reviewer.

I first log into the Azure Portal as the admin user and open up the AAD PIM shortcut from my dashboard. Once the application opens, I’m going to navigate to the Azure AD directory roles option.

After selecting the option my main menu is refreshed to show the management options for the various AAD PIM features. As a quick refresher, let’s look at the settings I’ve configured for Access Reviews in my tenant. We navigate to those Settings by clicking the Settings option as seen below and selecting Access Reviews.

As you can see from the settings in the screenshot below, my tenant is set to send mail notifications to reviewers when a review is started and to admins when it finishes. It’s also configured for reminders to be sent out to reviewers who haven’t yet completed their review. I’ve configured reviewers to provider a reason as to why continued access to a privileged role needs to be maintained. This is a great little option to capture the business requirements behind the access. Finally, my access reviews are configured to run a total of 30 days.

Let’s navigate back to the Access Review blade under the management menu.

On the Access Reviews blade we see a listing of the access reviews in progress. You can see I setup an access review for users that are members of the Global Admins role. On the top we have the menu options to start a new access review, filter what access reviews are displayed, change the way they are grouped, and go back to the Access Review settings I showed earlier.

et’s spin up a new access review for users who are permanent or eligible members of the User Administrators Azure AD role. We click the Add link and a new blade opens where we can configure a number of options. We have the basic options of naming the access review, providing a description, and a start and end date.

I’ve selected the User Administrator role as the role being reviewed during this access review. Notice the Scope option with the Everyone radio button. Perhaps that’s a placeholder for functionality that will be introduced in the future to limit the users within a role that the access review will cover. I’ve selected Homer Simpson to be the reviewer for the role. The advanced settings have inherited the global settings for my tenant for access reviews I covered previously. Once the information is filled in, I hit the start button to kick off the access review.

It takes a few minutes for the access review to be created and then it’s displayed in the listing of access reviews with a status of active.

If we navigate over to Homer Simpson’s Outlook inbox, we see he has received an email informing him an access review has been kicked off and he has been designated as a reviewer and must approve or reject other members’ continued eligibility for the role.

If we delay acting on the access review for a day we receive another reminder email per our settings. The email can be seen below.

If the approvers do not respond to the access review, the review completes but records that none of the users have been reviewed.

Let’s spin up another review and complete this one.

Homer Simpson again receives the notice that an Access Review has been kicked off. Clicking the Start Review button in the email opens up the Azure Portal and the AAD PIM blade. Here Homer gets an overview of the access review including the user who created the review, the length of the review, the description of the review, and the users who are members (permanent or eligible) for the role.

The filter option allows us to filter on the listing of users based upon whether they still need to be reviewed or have been approved or denied.

We first check off Bart Simpson and see that we are required to input a reason for Bart’s approval or denial. I input a reason and choose the deny button. Bart disappears from the menu. If I use the filter option to show all three categories of users, Bart now reappears under the denied category.

I check off both Homer and Marge and provide a reason for both users and hit the approve button. All users have been reviewed by Homer Simpson. After refreshing the page the review now shows 0 users remaining to be reviewed.

Switching over to the browser for the admin user we see that the access review is still open.

If we open the access review we can see that all users have been reviewed even though the review is still active. We have the option to Reset the access review to force the approvers to perform the access review activities again or we can stop it. We’re going to choose end the access review early now that all the reviews have been completed.

Re-opening the access review, we now have the option to apply the results of it. After clicking he Apply button the changes are applied and we’re notified via the Portal notification system.

Navigating to the roles blade under the Manage section now shows only Homer and Marge as being eligible for the User Administrator role verifying that the changes made during the access review have taken effect.

The access review feature is a wonderful addition by Microsoft. Back in the olden days of Windows Active Directory, managing the entire lifecycle of an identity and its entitlements often involved complex third-party identity management solutions in combination with request management system. By including this feature out of the gates, Microsoft is showing a real maturity in its identity offerings.

A Brief Intermission

Before I get into what AAD PIM can do for Azure RBAC, I want to touch on a new feature that went into public preview while I was working on this post. Notice in the Manage section the Roles blade now has a (Preview) notation after it.

Navigating into the blade shows an entirely new interface with far more useful information. We now have a complete list of the roles AAD PIM can manage including descriptions. If we select a role we go a level deeper and can add users to the role as we would expect.

We also have two new menu options for Description and Definition. The Description blade opens up and gives us a link to the Microsoft documentation on the role as well as every permissions the role has (AWESOME!). The Definition blade gives us a JSON view of the role information. Perhaps we’ll be able to create custom AAD / O365 roles in the future and we’ll be able to use these JSON views as ARM templates? Time will tell.

The introduction of this new feature is a great demonstration of how quickly things change in the cloud.

AAD PIM and Azure RBAC

Most organizations consuming Microsoft cloud services don’t just consume Office 365. These organizations want to yield the benefits of the infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) services provide by Microsoft’s Azure offering. Managing authorization in Azure is handled through Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). In short, Azure RBAC provides a method of authorizing a security principal (user, group, or service principal) to perform an action on a resource (VM, storage account, Azure SQL, etc) based upon membership in a role. Out of the box Microsoft provides a few roles such as owner, reader, and contributor. You can also create custom roles to fit your business needs.

Similar to Office 365 prior to AAD PIM, preventing standing access of security principals in Azure RBAC roles was left to custom scripts and third-party solutions. Last year it was announcedthat AAD PIM capabilities were being extended to Azure RBAC. The integration of AAD PIM and Azure RBAC become generally available in the commercial offering of Azure AD in May of 2018.

For this demonstration I’m going to switch over to my Geek In The Weeds tenant. Recall that the tenant is a synchronized and federated tenant using Azure AD Connect and Active Directory Federation Services. I’ve already activated AAD PIM for the tenant so I’ll be jumping right into its integration with Azure RBAC.

After logging into the portal as a user who has permanent membership in the Privileged Role Administrator role I’m faced with the standard admin view of AAD PIM. In the Manage menu I’m going to select the Azure resources option.

If this is your first time using AAD PIM with Azure RBAC you’ll need to go through the discovery stage. This will discover Azure Resources that you have write permissions to and thus have the ability to manage privileged access to. After discovery is complete you’ll see a screen similar to the below. You can see that my user is a member of the owners role for the Visual Studio Enterprise Azure subscription and that there are 77 roles defined for the subscription with three security principals holding one or more roles.

Selecting the subscription resource gives us a dashboard displaying key metrics about PIM activity within the subscription.

One of the metrics that caught my eye was the single user in the User Access Administrator role. Selecting that area of the dashboard opens a new blade which lists out the members of the role. We can see the service principal for PIM has been added to the User Access Administrator role to grant the service permissions to administer the roles within the resource (in this case a subscription).

Notice also that the PIM menu for managing Azure AD/Office 365 differs for the menu for managing Azure RBAC. We see that the new Role options I outlined above haven’t been migrated to the Azure RBAC integration yet. Additionally we see that the request approval workflow is still in public preview in Azure RBAC. In the Azure RBAC menu we also get a Resource Audit log which details PIM activity within the resource.

Notice also that the general Settings option isn’t present in the Azure RBAC menu. Instead we have a Role Settings option. Selecting this option opens a new blade that lists out the Roles associated with the Resource. Selecting any of the resources opens a new blade where we have the options of configuring a large selection of options for the role for both assignment (making the user eligible or a permanent member) as well as activation. If you recall the configurable options for the Azure AD / Office 365 roles, these are far more granular. The additional flexibility makes sense because these roles are going to managing IaaS and PaaS resources which are much more catered to programmatic access by non-humans. The non-human access tends to be much more predictable than human access, so enforcing controls such as temporary eligibility for a role makes a lot of sense.

Let’s take a look at what the experience is adding a user to one of the RBAC roles. The process is very similar to AAD PIM with Azure AD / Office 365 in that we select the Roles option from the Manage section. For this demonstration I’m going to add a user to the Virtual Machine Contributor role.

Clicking the Add Member option allows me to assign Ash Williams as an eligible member of the role. Notice the additional option called Set membership settings. Here I can set a timespan that Ash is eligible for the role. This option isn’t available in AAD PIM for Azure AD / Office 365 that I could see.

After hitting the add button Ash is successfully added as a Direct member to the role. Notice that I can also add groups as members of the Role. This is another capability unit to the Azure RBAC integration.

Let’s go through the user experience for activating a role. For the sake of simplicity I’m going to cover differences in the user experience. You can reference my third post if you’re curious of the full user experience.

At this point I’ve logged into a virtual machine as Ash Williams and have authenticated to the Azure Portal. I’ve entered the Azure resources blade. Here we see the user being informed that no Azure resources are protected by PIM. In this instance hitting the Discover resources permission will not update this menu because Ash Williams isn’t a member of any role that would grant him write permissions on an Azure Resource. Instead I’m going to click the Activate Role button.

After clicking the Activate role button I’m shown the roles Ash Williams is eligible to activate. Notice Ash has the ability to activate the role due to both his direct membership and his membership in the GIW AIP Users group. I’d recommend leveraging groups for this access where possible so you don’t get in the situation where you grant a security principal longer access to the role than you wanted due to a direct role assignment situation.

he activation experience and approval experience is the same from this point forward so I’m going stop here.

Summing It Up

I really enjoyed this blog series. I hadn’t done a deep dive into AAD PIM since it was in public preview and much has changed since then. I really like how Microsoft is finally exposing capabilities which have historically been more Azure AD / Office 365 centric to Microsoft Azure. It’s an excellent marketing tool for companies who may already be using Office 365 but are using another cloud provider for IaaS and PaaS. The product team has also done great job integrating much needed features such as approval workflows, access reviews, and metrics.

I’m not going to have the time to do a post about the AAD PIM PowerShell module but I recommend you check it out if you have some bandwidth. There are some great opportunities there to integrate PIM functionality with third party workflow management tools to automate the entire user experience behind a GUI you users are already familiar with.

That wraps up my series on Azure AD Privileged Identity Management. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

If you’ve ever had to manage an application, you’re familiar with the challenge of trying to keep a balance between security and usability when it comes to privileged access. In many cases you’re stuck with users that have permanent membership in privileged roles because the impact to usability of the application is far too great to manage that access on an “as needed basis” or as we refer to it in the industry “just in time” (JIT). If you do manage to remove that permanent membership requirement (often referred to as standing privileged access) you’re typically stuck with a complicated automation solution or a convoluted engineering solution that gives you security but at the cost of usability and increasing operational complexity.

Not long ago the privileged roles within Azure Active Directory (AAD), Office 365 (O365), and Azure Role-Based Access Control had this same problem. Either a user was a permanent member of the privileged role or you had to string together some type of request workflow that interacted with the Graph API or triggered a PowerShell script. In my first entry into Azure AD, I had a convoluted manual process which involved requests, approvals, and a centralized password management system. It worked, but it definitely impacted productivity.

Thankfully Microsoft (MS) has addressed this challenge with the introduction of Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (AAD PIM). In simple terms AAD PIM introduces the concept of an “eligible” administrator which allows you to achieve that oh so wonderful JIT. AAD PIM is capable of managing a wide variety of roles which is another area Microsoft has made major improvements on. Just a few years ago close to everything required being in the Global Admin role which was a security nightmare.

In addition to JIT, AAD PIM also provides a solid level of logging and analytics, a centralized view into what users are members of privileged roles, alerting around the usage of privileged roles, approval workflow capabilities (love this feature), and even provides an access review capability to help with access certification campaigns. You can interact with AAD PIM through the Azure Portal, Graph API, or PowerShell.

To get JIT you’ll need an Azure Active Directory Premium P2 or Enteprise Mobility and Security E5 license. Microsoft states that every use that benefits from the feature requires a license. While this is a licensing requirement, it’s not technically enforced as we see in my upcoming posts.

You’re probably saying, “Well this is all well and good Matt, but there is nothing here I couldn’t glean from Microsoft documentation.” No worries my friends, we’ll be using this series to walk to demonstrate the capabilities so you can see them in action. I’ll also be breaking out my favorite tool Fiddler to take a look behind the scenes of how Microsoft manages to elevate access for the user after a privileged role has been activated.

About Me

Hi there! My name is Matt Felton and I am a long time geek with a passion for technology. I have over 10 years experience in the industry that spans the technology stack. Over the past few years I’ve had the opportunity to dig deeper into security and identity which I’ve been more than happy to do.

I started Journey Of The Geek over 6 six years ago when I saw an opportunity to provide in-depth technical deep dives to peel back the onion on technologies and products. I enjoy sharing what I’ve learned and giving back to the industry. Plus there is no better way to learn a topic than to teach it.

I hope you enjoy and if you have questions feel free to reach out via the comments, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

DISCLAIMER

All views expressed on this site are my own and do not represent the opinions of any entity whatsoever of which I have been, am now, or will be affiliated.